In today’s world, customer satisfaction and customer advisory are increasingly variables. From previous days, now customers have enough power to drive the business’s operating practices and also for product and service offerings. A customer advisory board is a great tactic to keep customers satisfies and deliver an excellent level of customer experience.

So what is Customer Advisory Board?

Many businesses use a customer advisory board to assist them with market and customer research efforts. A customer advisory board is  a group of key customers that a company invites to a meeting and also in additional periodic meetings to offer feedback of the product or service as well as the overall impressions of the company. Usually, the members of customer advisory board are high level executives at their organization and therefore they  can provide in depth-mark insight. There are several objectives of customer advisory boards, they are:

  • To validate the product ideas and validate the product roadmap
  • To gather market intelligence
  • To create champions for their brand
  • Give a shape in the marketing messaging

A customer advisory board acts as a representative sample of the company’s broader market. This board  includes a cross-section of customers which represents as many different market segments as possible.

Why are customer advisory boards important?

Customers appreciate for being a part of the decision making process and will reward us with their loyalty. They may even become brand advocates. In addition to that, it is a great networking opportunity for customers, as they can form relationships with other customers who participate. We can also communicate to the entire customer base the changes we plan to make to address their pain points and fill their needs.

A study of Canadian companies revealed that:

  • In the three years after instituting a customer advisory board, sales grew at an average of 66.8% compared to growth rate of just 22.9% in the three previous years.
  • Internal productivity grew at an average of 5.9% compared to 3.2% in the three previous years.

What are the benefits of Customer Advisory Board?

Businesses that assemble customer advisory boards they find many benefits from the gatherings they host with their customer advisory board members. Some of the benefits are:

  • They can help to guide the company’s strategic direction.We can create an open forum in which key customers can speak candidly at length about why they have chosen our company over the competition, what they like about our products and what they would like to see So they can help our team to get a better sense of where to focus our strategic efforts and resources.
  • They can help to guide the product roadmap. A customer advisory board can provide insights into how customers are actually using our products, what aspects of those products are most important or beneficial to them and also what other functionality or tools they believe would complement or enhance our offerings.
  • They can increase customer loyalty. A benefit of having customer advisory board is that the advisory members will likely spend more with our company as a result of participating in customer advisory board. B2B businesses with customer advisory boards experience an average of 9% more in new business from the customer advisory board members than from their broader customer base.
  • Unparallel insight into business strategy: Our customersare the best resource to provide input of our company’s overall direction and business strategies. Customers should be able to advise on the products and services they desire, what they would pay for them and how they want to deliver the products. The below mention things we have to keep in mind:
  1. Which markets to pursue
  2. What customer pain points to address
  3. Which companies to partner with or acquire
  4. How to best exploit the competitors’ weak points
  5. How to position our company for optimal advantage
  • Increased sales revenue and customer retention: The often unspoken benefit from the customer advisory board is the positive impact which shows an incremental sales revenue. The council members of the organization will likely increase the overall business over time. This is due to the fact that growth strategy is a early tester for our solutions and more dedicated to our offerings.